1976  was it your best year ever?

Share via

An economists’ think-tank has identified 1976 as Britain’s best year  a time when our quality of life reached an all-time high. But is that how we recall the year of the drought, the Sex Pistols and 17 per cent inflation?

IT SEEMED like a good year at the time. I was married in Chelsea Register Office in the summer of 1976. There were portents of what was to come but I couldn’t see them at the time, love being blind.

We lived in a four-bedroom flat of a mansion block in Flood Street, Chelsea, down the road from an opposition MP called Margaret Thatcher.

I was a columnist on the London Evening News, a job that was given to me by an editor whose brief was: “Write something half way between Jean Rook and Lynda Lee-Potter.” Luckily my husband was